3/27/2017

The Mistreatment of Undocumented Immigrants Is Gonna Bite Us on Our American Asses

In the wake of the deranged crackdown on undocumented immigrants that has marked the snowballing viciousness of the Trump administration, we already know that Latino victims of sexual assault and domestic abuse have started to avoid the police and not report the violence against them. In Los Angeles, for instance, "sexual assault reporting has declined by 25 percent among the city’s Latinos, and domestic violence reporting by 10 percent since the start of the year, compared to the same period in 2016." No other ethnic group had a decline. And that drop ain't because only "bad hombres" are being deported.

Now, Jeff Sessions, a tiny, racist vole who happens to be Attorney General, announced that the Department of Justice is going to deny grant funds to cities and states that have "sanctuary" policies. This includes things like community policing funding that cities need. In other words, if you're not gonna be a total dick to undocumented immigrants, Donald Trump wants you punished.

The Trump administration wants you to believe that they are doing this to prevent crime, and, goddamn, they are gonna flog the same horrors over and over. Once again, an official dragged out the corpse of Kate Steinle, the San Francisco woman who was killed by an undocumented man (in what was likely an accidental shooting), and Sessions, like Trump before him, just fucked the shit out her body, saying, "Yeah, you see this? You want us to fuck more corpses? Because we're shit-eating crazy motherfuckers about the illegals! Stop us before we make you watch us fuck again!" Steinle's death is a tragedy, no doubt, but the way Trump and the Trumpazoids talk about it, it's the single most important event in American history since, oh, hell, let's say Benghazi.

What's more likely than murder by an undocumented immigrant is violence being done to an undocumented immigrant. And if we don't protect immigrants who give information to law enforcement, whether to help themselves or others, sometime, in the near future, here's what's gonna happen, if it hasn't happened already:

-- A family whose breadwinner was deported will end up reliant on public assistance to get by, thus going from taxpayers to people needing help from the government.

-- An immigrant will witness a murder or another crime and, instead of reporting it and risk being deported, will stay silent because they are the breadwinner in their family.

-- An undocumented immigrant will hear of a terrorist plot and refuse to say something because, well, you get it.

As with most of Trump's policies, the approach to undocumented immigrants is irrational, short-sighted, blindingly ignorant, and symbolic rather than grounded in, you know, reality. It will do far, far more harm than good. It targets almost only non-whites, so it's racist as hell. And it's gonna bite all of us in the ass. Or the wallet.

One way or another, we're gonna pay for the cruelty that we do in the name of fake security.